Archive for the Introductions Category

After some thought, I am going to make some changes to what I write and how often I write. I have mostly written in the morning, putting out stream of consciousness thoughts on a some particular subject. That is fun and I love doing. It will continue. It is my morning warm up ritual. After I work out my 500-800 words, the day seems to flow better for me.

What I am going to add are three additional prescribed weekly posts and more posts throughout the day. The goal is at least 2 posts per day. The morning warm-up and then something more structured and planned.

Now, the three prescribed posts will be two fiction attempts and one beer tasting post. You read correctly, I want to write two short stories (or serialized stories) per week. I won’t be pulling these stories completely out of the air, but I want to hold off saying how I plan to get my ideas. I will say this. I want to try and do something that takes advantage of some of the opportunities that the internet and technology provide.

The third post may be my favorite. I already keep track of my beer drinking on Untappd.com under the user name uncmoe. With the opening of Dragonfly Market Wine Market in uptown Shelby, my craft beer drinking has expanded even further. There is so much good and interesting beer out there and I have a space in which I can write about them that it seems perfect to add my voice to the cacophony of beer writing on the internet. Maybe I’ll be one of the better entries into the beer talk. Maybe I won’t. Time will tell.

I’m hoping to put the fiction out on Sundays and Wednesdays and the beer notes will come out on Friday or more likely Saturday.

The thought process that lead me to this began about a month ago. I have been thinking of how to make my posts more structured and to use the blog to write more fiction.

The thing I have discovered (or actually was reminded of) is that the more that I write the more I write. Through these many blog posts I have not only started to find my voice and rhythm I have also primed the synapses in my brain responsible for this writing. It has made them more active and hungrier for work. I am interested in what exactly can accomplish with them if I focus them. Besides firing up the synapses I have also began to wonder what the possibilities of writing (particularly fiction) are in combination with the available technology. Basically, how can the internet make your story better?

I want to use the blog to test things out, to try to find what I am capable of doing on a daily basis. Maybe nothing will come of this. Maybe I’ll just be writing into a vacuum of my own entertainment. I have found that the older I get, the more I am interested in asking questions than getting answers.

The most addictive substance available in this country is not heroin, it is not crystal meth, it is not cigarettes, it is not alcohol. It is money.

Those who have a lot of money always want more, see conference realignment in college sports. Those who don’t have it will often do whatever it takes to get just a little bit, most drug dealing and prostitution fall into this category.

The worst ideas come when money is the primary goal. Take this job and you will make more money. You may have to give up a great deal of your life, but you will have more money that you don’t have time to spend.

A logical argument about making more money is this: You’ll have more money, and if you don’t like the job, you can leave it after a little while. The job doesn’t make you, you make the job. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to let it consume your life. That is a perfectly logical and perfectly plausible way to live your life that people I love and respect have been giving me. This advice makes perfect sense, in a vacuum.

Real life doesn’t work that way for many people. The mental exhaustion from walling off all the different parts of yourself is too much to deal with on a daily basis.

I started this post as a critique of the ball faced greed of the college conference commissioners and how everything they have done has been the explicit and short-sighted attempt to get as much money as humanly possible.

However, as often happens in life, personal issues informed and have been informed by these real world issues.

At a certain age, you gain the ability to look back and see patterns in your life. You see how repeat the same patterns over and over. If you are lucky those patterns reveal to you the keys to your success. For many, those patterns reveal the places you continue to make mistakes.

My repeated mistake has always been to play it safe, to always give myself and out, to never allow myself to commit.

So, I’ve been asking myself a question for the last week: If I die tomorrow, what have I accomplished. The question for me is not even about being successful in the things I want to do, but it is about the attempt to accomplish the things I want. My decisions have to be based on that and not on anything else.

That means I’m going to be making decisions that are seemingly ludicrous and counter-intuitive to being successful. As the song says, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. I look at my life and where I am, and I have nothing left to lose.

There are three things in life that I really love and care about: Beer, sports, and music. Any day in which I get to watch a good sporting event (sometimes even a bad one will do), drink a good beer (only a craft beer will do), and listen to good music (almost anything good will do) is a day sent from heaven.

I have been recalcitrant in in writing for the blog, so I will do something about that. My goal is a post a day for at least a month. Will see how that goes. Most posts will have something to do with sports and what is happening in the world of sports, but I will also drop some beer and music thoughts.

I have a weird and varied knowledge of all kinds of things. Just ask Terry. He is still trying to figure out how I made a brilliant Tim Richmond/Stroker Ace reference a couple of months ago.

The idea of this blog came about a couple of weeks ago, over beers. The concept was crystallized when I sent a text to Terry informing him that Stroker Ace was on CMT. I don’t think I saw it in the theater (I did see Six Pack starring Kenny Rogers and Diane Lane.), but I have seen it multiple times. This, to Terry’s amusement, led to me correctly dropping Neil Bonnet and Tim Richmond references.

That, in a nut shell is what this blog will be about: How Terry (Eightball) and I (Cueball) look at the world from our perches in North Carolina.

A little more about me:

Born and raised in Shelby, NC

Went to UNC-Chapel Hill

Lived in uptown Charlotte for 6 years

Worked in not for profits and as a free lance writer since graduating UNC

Trying to balance writing with a job as a department manager in a big box retail store

Love the three B’s: beer, bourbon, basketball (mostly college)

The rest will reveal itself as this thing rolls along

Neither Terry or I have any idea how the posts will break down, but we each have our own separate interests and that should organically become obvious to readers and to us, honestly. Though I do have an idea of what I want to write about in this space. There will be talk of craft beer, college sports (mostly basketball), and pop culture.

We are also going to try and do a periodic podcast with format and topics to be determined.

Still deciding on what my first real post will be. Hopefully, if the alma mater wins this afternoon, I will have a lot to talk about. Until then, later on.